there is something so tragic about a blank face and a ***** mirror. about 3 a.m eyes and our own fingers, mapping the parts of us we hate. there is something so damaging about resurfacing old ideas while juggling target practice with the wooden box kept bundled under piles of wrinkled clothes, stowed away in our dressers like safes, holding sharp things we would never touch on other days.

how can one relearn the idea of sleep?

because melatonin only worked once and benzodiazepines only kept us asleep long enough to dream about the bad things we avoided falling asleep for.

3 a.m feels like dry eyes and grown-out nails, bitten down until brittle. 3 a.m feels like a bed we are too afraid to crawl into and our own eyes we are too afraid to stare at. 3 a.m feels like a cold, creaking tiled floor, muffled from our fragile steps we took over it.

3 a.m feels like fear and sounds like the repeated notion of grinding teeth instead destroyed skin.

i keep studying the stain on the ceiling as though it were a separate universe. I keep willing it to take me away. outside, it's raining, without leaving a sound or smell behind, just flooded window wells and a distant ringing in my ears.

& praying used to be words i sung inside my head as though they could sing me towards some kind of promised refuge, but they never offered me anything except more of what i was already left with -

fear, constant fear, that things don't change, they just reshape themselves into shadows, into 3 a.m night lights and closed mouths that never stopped trembling.